An excellent question, lakewhut. It should be asked more often.
It looks like Israel’s goals in this war are shrinking with every day. While in the begining, they wanted to “Flatten Gaza”, the goals now are merely to rebuilt deterrence, and incapacitate Hamas’s military and administrative capabilities. If that sounds familiar to you, it should — these are the same goals that Israel set for itself at all previous engagements with Hamas. This shows that all talk about a change in “contzeptiya” and deep soul searching is empty — Israel is back at the same plate.
The reason Israel is regurgitating the same concepts that have shown themselves so impotent, is Israel has no other concept. Israel has to either 1) accept Arabs next to them, or 2) expel them, or 3) expel themselves. Expelling the Arabs, like Rabbi Kahane zt”l hy”d begged us to do for decades, will carry with it a stiff diplomatic penalty — Israel may find itself as isolated as North Korea, which will also be a victory for Iran. We just need to consider if that’s better than what happened two weeks ago.